John Clayton promises to keep his secret ponytail in bittersweet tweet about being laid off

John Clayton confirmed reports that surfaced on Wednesday that his time with ESPN was ending, making him one of the many well-known faces on the network to depart in a wave of layoffs this month. And in one tweet, he reminded us all of the brilliant and hilarious way he’s handled the long-running question: Does John Clayton have a ponytail?

The questions about Clayton’s ponytail go back to at least 2010, which at one point reportedly sparked this response from an unnamed ESPN spokesperson to a Deadspin reporter who asked the network if a video was evidence of Clayton’s ponytail:

“[A]pparently its possible to have hair combed out a bit in back…far from ponytail…now you can go back to deconstructing the kennedy assassination..

Clayton later addressed it in an interview with the New York Times Magazine, where he tried to explain where this whole thing started.

Q: There’s lots of speculation about your hair, specifically that you have a secret ponytail.

A: ESPN has this thing called Glowpoint. It’s a camera that’s in my house so that I don’t have to go down to a studio and the company doesn’t have to pay for the satellite. When you see me on camera, it’s the same angle all the time. When Dan Patrick left the network, he started the rumor that I have a ponytail that you can’t see. Obviously I don’t have enough hair on the top of my head to make a ponytail. But if you go on Twitter, it’s a constant question: Do you have a ponytail?

He also mocked it in a brilliant SportsCenter commercial in 2012 and in 2013, we believed that he proved he did not have a ponytail when he threw out the first pitch at a baseball game in Seattle.

But on a more serious note, people losing their jobs stinks and we hope that Clayton appears on another network soon to re-start the questions about his ponytail.